Steve Jobs was so angered by Android and HTC that he reportedly told then …

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Walter Isaacson's forthcoming biography of Steve Jobs is on a kind of crypto-PR tour, having magically landed in the hands of a gaggle of journalists well in advance of its publication. Said journalists are furiously typing with one hand and flipping pages with the other, bringing us glimpses of the year's most anticipated biography of a recently deceased mega-icon of technology. Yesterday, for instance, it was revealed that Jobs regretted delaying potentially life-extending surgery in the very early days of his diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. Now in a wide-ranging survey of the biography, the AP reports that Jobs' disdain for Android was much greater than that for any other competitive product.

According to Isaacson, Steve Jobs' reaction to the January 2010 unveiling of the HTC smartphone lineup was fury. Calling it "a great theft," Jobs supposedly proclaimed, "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong... I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

Jobs meant it. Apple would kick off the lawsuits shortly thereafter, and the company hasn't been ignored itself. Countersuits have been filed, and as we have reported on Ars, just about everyone is suing everyone else.

Of course, lawsuits are usually made to be settled, but Jobs was having none of it. Meeting with then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a man who for years sat on Apple's board before Android made that no longer possible, Jobs told Schmidt that money wasn't going to make it right. "I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it," Jobs reportedly said. "I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want." And with that, the door to any possible settlement was slammed shut. We wonder if Jobs' passing will open the door to lawsuit settlements down the road.

Isaacson's book, Steve Jobs will hit store shelves on Monday, October 24, and the Ars review of the book will be up shortly thereafter, so keep an eye out for it.

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher

I'll admit that there are some things that are pretty obviously copied, though I don't know how a mobile touchscreen OS couldn't have similarities to each other. Apple copied things from Android, hell Steve Jobs said that great artists steal, perhaps he only meant that when he was the one stealing?

Sorry - Apple does a lot of things extremely well. The thing I'd argue they do the best is taking existing ideas, refining them, and executing them. Android is no more a rip-off of Apple/iOS than many elements of Apple's design are of others (Braun anyone?). I'm not suggesting this is wrong because I support Apple (and other companies) in this strategy - it's just incredibly hypocritical of them.

Edit: Look at every industry in the last 20 years. Every time a new product comes out and is successful, another firm immediately comes up with a competing product with similar functionality that appeals to the same market segment.

It's my belief that Android angered Jobs because it didn't fit in with the competitive environment he envisioned, where all the companies exert a great deal of control over their platforms and content distribution (Microsoft is very similar to Apple in this regard). The open (not open source) aspect of Android, will always be inherently appealing to a certain demographic who don't like that aspect of Apple. This really shut a brick of the market off to Jobs permanently, and ensured there would be low-margin competition forever, even if it's an inferior product. The very nature of Google's OS made it the worst thing that could have been introduced - no doubt Steve was upset about this. He wanted to compete with another Microsoft, whom he'd crush like RIM.

Said journalists are furiously typing with one hand and flipping pages with the other, bringing us glimpses of the year's most anticipated biography of a recently deceased mega-icon of technology.

Oh is that what they're doing?

Quote:

According to Isaacson, Steve Jobs' reaction to the January 2010 unveiling of the HTC smartphone lineup was fury. Calling it "a great theft," Jobs supposedly proclaimed, "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong... I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

Android copied pinch-to-zoom, slide-to-unlock and other gestures from iOS, and swipe-to-delete from WebOS.iOS copied the notification system, location sharing, multi-tasking and other features from Android.

I'm sure WebOS and WP7 have copied features too. I haven't used them enough to know.

I have to say, I thought the same thing. Jobs, above all, should know that the patent system doesn't allow for this "thermonuclear" option. It's a long, grueling war of attrition that rarely results in any meaningful results in the short term. I just hear frustration talking.

These quotes about how Android stole everything from Apple are just dumb. In the world of competitive software you have to adapt to survive, just like how Apple recently added a notification drawer that looks nearly identical to Android. Steve may have been a visionary but he was also kind of delusional.

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong... I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

Xerox wasn't stolen from. PARC was freely giving tours to anybody who wanted to take a look at what they had. They were still buried in the copier business so they didn't quite see what they had.

I think Steve (rightly so) is more pissed that Google in the form of Schmidt was an Apple boardmember. If Android came out on their own and they didnt' have anything to do with Apple, I don't quite think it would affect him as much.

I could understand how upset he must have been though, seeing 'his baby' stolen from somebody who he saw as trusted.

Anyone else get the impression that Steve was a bit nuts? He was ultra obsessive and had to have things his way. (Here's to the crazy ones…but literally.) In many ways his personality was good for Apple but in some ways it was bad.

Well this totally explains Apple's legal strategy - Steve's mad so we keep suing everyone, everywhere as long as we can and let the lawyers figure out whether there's any basis for doing it. Never mind whether Apple has any legal right to stop people from "using our ideas" anymore than any other consumer industry - Steve felt a way, so that's what the company did. I'm sure he had flashbacks of Macintosh/Windows and made a purely emotional decision - "its happening again!!" I completely understand his feelings - he was an emotional, driven human.

Ironically, it was his decision to END that legal crusade against Microsoft and settle for MONEY that gave Apple the means to make their comeback. Its amazing how much that litigation looks like the current one (and how much the judges told Apple that general ideas like GUIs can't be patented even back then).

Lets hope Apple's board, freed of their duty to 'do whatever Steve wants' can make a rational decision now and stop the insanity.

This backs up the stories from a few months ago that suggested Google was running blind and unprepared into the intellectual property aspect of their business. Assuming they could just violate years' worth of IP and then buy off Apple in a settlement is remarkably shortsighted and they are lucky to be so well-funded.

Android has a lot of qualities. But I must say state of earlier Android prototypes give a idea of how far Google was initially from iPhone form factor and GUI. Who in their right mind would think Schmidt presence at Apple's board during iPhone latest stages of development has nothing to do with how fast Google caught up after it was released…

Android has been in development just as long as IOS and there were already prototype devices waay back in 2007. Having a slab phone design is not a copy of the iphone. This is the problem with patents, they offer them for such ridiculous things like Amazon's one click check out. Compare that one photo of an older slab type devices from Samsung that came out Jan 2007 vs the iphone. I'm glad thinngs have ended up the way they are now aside from the fact some of the ridiculous lawsuits are happening. There are people in Australia who *WANT* to buy Galaxy 10.1 tablets but cannot because of incorrect laws and horrible patents. It's really just showing how shameful of a person Steve Jobs was; not caring about anyone but himself and his company with blatant disregard to other company's innovating in the same areas. Absolute nonsense.

If you believe the conspiracy theories, MS had to pay out more than a billion to settle Apple's suit against them. Of course, there's no record of that actually happening. And then on top of that, for some reason the settlement forced MS into buying $100 million in Apple stock and promising to support IE and Office on Mac OS for five years. Man, that Steve Jobs really knew how to turn the screws!

I have to say, I thought the same thing. Jobs, above all, should know that the patent system doesn't allow for this "thermonuclear" option. It's a long, grueling war of attrition that rarely results in any meaningful results in the short term. I just hear frustration talking.

I guess I've misinterpreted the man to some extent, because his actions here don't make sense to me. Sure, he loved Apple and would have wanted to protect it, but at the same time, the iPhone's success and continued popularity were guaranteed. Why waste time and energy over this? At the very least, the ideas that they "stole" are going to make the market as a whole much better for the consumer. Isn't this a win-win for everybody?